A Powerful practice for inner peace & stress relief
Allowing & acknowledging everything about yourself & your life
Happy Friday!
And welcome to today’s edition of ‘Conscious living with Purnima’. In today’s post I will share with you a powerful practice for inner peace & stress relief. It works beautifully for me & I invite you to try it out in your own life & test its efficacy.
Take the time to completely acknowledge & accept who you are (in the present moment) & what you are going through & be at peace with it.
One way we add stress to our life is by rejecting parts of us or our life that we don’t like. If we can become aware and practice gentle acceptance or even acceptance that we are unable to accept our situation, can be very powerful in maintaining an unruffled inner weather.
Stress is exacerbated when we continually think & work towards creating a better future because we believe that our present is terrible, something to run away from.
Ask yourself:
Does your life really have to be a never-ending self-improvement project? What happens when you treat your life that way? Can you be present and enjoy the beauty that exists right here, right now? Can you recognize the beauty in you right in this moment without the need to fix yourself?
In today’s world, most of us are not able to be present because of this urgency (self-imposed) to be a better version. The need to keep running towards a better place, is the root cause of our stress.
All this does not mean that we should stop working on ourselves. It’s just that the attitude we bring to the work should be from a place of peace, acceptance, self-understanding & self-compassion. And not an escape & race to a better place at the cost of becoming oblivious to the beauty that’s present in the now.
Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher, said something deep on learning to love yourself. He said:
“I think it really for me, what it has been, is acknowledging and allowing all of the stuff in myself. Just starting to allow it, allowing the fact I can be neurotic, to allow the fact that I can have all my petty little fears and that I sometimes get angry, and I sometimes am arrogant, and I sometimes doubt. And it’s all there, and sometimes I’m lazy and sometimes I’m energetic and sometimes I’m ego needful and sometimes I’m fulfilled. And allow all of that and just keep allowing. And just keep allowing, and allowing, and acknowledging and allowing saying, ‘Yes, that too, and that too, and that too.’ It’s like expanding to allow myself. Sometimes I feel guilty, sometimes I’m ashamed, sometimes I feel trivial. Sometimes before a lecture I feel anxious & insecure. Sometimes I feel totally at one with everybody & they’re all me. It’s all parts of the dance, of the flow, and it’s just constantly saying, ‘and that too, and that too’. And when I get into depression instead of I’m depressed, it is more like, wow, dig that depression, and that too. It’s sort of developing, cultivating, another part of my being. That is what’s called ‘the witness’ or ‘the listener’ or ‘the noter’. That is there in addition to the part that’s depressed or the part that’s angry or so on.
I felt those verses carry a deep lesson for us.
Our mindset of disowning everything uncomfortable about ourselves or our lives & treating them as if they are something to be ashamed about causes us undue suffering.
Today, I invite you to challenge the belief that you need to continuously keep bettering yourself to be worthy or valued. If you can challenge that belief & embrace yourself fully, being lovingly present with yourself, then you will find that you create a lot of mental space to be at peace no matter what your external circumstance or inner experience. You may continue to do the work towards a future you desire, but your mental state would be a lot different with acknowledgement & acceptance.